Manchester Disc Golf Club has a course at Longford Park set in a community park on the site of a former pitch and putt golf course. There is ample free parking, although there is a five minute walk from the larger car park. The smaller car park close to the 1st Tee can get full quickly, with families wanting to use the playground areas. There are many facilities on the park for other users and it is adjacent to an athletics stadium.
Many people walk their dogs in the park, and although there are warning signs that you are entering a disc golf course, regulars tend to just wander where they like keeping a watching brief, if you're lucky, on whether anyone is throwing. It is a shared use park so just be considerate to others and use spotters where you cannot fully see.
There is a cafe close to the 1st Tee, where you can buy food and drinks and a there is also a toilet (restroom) adjacent.
There is a welcome board showing a map of the course as you approach the first tee.
This is an 18 holes course, designed by the Manchester Disc Golf Club Committee, with concrete Tees, Red Par 57, 4298ft & Blue Par 56, 5635ft. Some holes have a shared Tee box. It is a lightly wooded with regard to mature trees however, over time, the many many new trees that have been planted will make for interesting play in the future. As a result you will find enclosures to protect the young trees, with access points to enable the retrieving of discs. Please respect these areas and use the access points and don't climb over the wire fence. These areas are classed as Out of Bounds (OB), at the time of writing this Blog. If there has been a lot of rain you might want to wear boots of some description, as some areas on the course can get water logged.
Manchester Disc Golf Club (www.manchesterdiscgolf.co.uk) has a very good website that shows you the course layout, as well as each individual Tee, so you can view these on your smart phone. I had been measuring in feet from our time in Florida, so my UDisc is set up that way, however in the UK and Europe Disc Golf holes are measured in meters. You can of course use UDisc as well, set up as you like. Each Tee Box on the course has a well designed graphic tee post, showing the throw line of the fairway and any OB.
This was probably the best course we could have started on for our first experience of a UK course. It was very different to our previous experience in Florida with some interesting features as seen in the photos below.
A raised basket on a mound
High stakes protecting the line of flight to the basket
Even a druid like stone circle
Practice on our local park had been very useful but now playing on a proper course presented different challenges for us, especially when your disc landed in a spot where you had to get around bushes or under trees. I had had a throw of my partners Innova Mamba at our local park, just for a try, and I had seen an improvement in distance from when I had measured a throw in Florida in February. I feel I'm progressing with the forearm but still behaving like I have spaghetti arms with the backhand.
With new discs in the bag, it was time to start and see how these faired in a course environment. The Latitude discs, for me did fly better than the previous Innova Discs I'd used. They had more glide and it seemed that to throw, I didn't have to try quite as hard. I guess not being as young as I used to be, I'm learning that you haven't got the same power and speed as maybe you did when you were 30 or even 20 years younger, so take advantage of what's available. I know it's really still early days, and those players you see in the competitions have been playing for many years and subsequently have had lots of conditioning to the sport but I want to throw better.
We had great fun learning the course and being there early on a week day, we were able to do two rounds before too many people came to enjoy their daily exercise too, including having a picnic in the middle of the fairway. Strangely we didn't see any other players, but these Covid times have been challenging. Still our plan was to come back to this course weekly and continue with practice on our local park.
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